I, for one, welcome our new, more inclusive Apple

In case you have not been following closely, at this year’s WWDC Apple introduced a number of technologies that reverse many long-standing policies on what iOS apps were, or to be more accurate, were not allowed to do: technologies such as app extensions, third-party keyboards, Touch ID APIs, manual camera controls, Cloud Kit, or simply the ability to sell apps in bundles on the iOS App Store. I would be remiss if I did not mention a few of my pet peeves that apparently remain unaddressed, such as searching inside third-party apps from the iOS Springboard, real support for trials on the iOS App Store and the Mac App Store (more on that in a later post), any way to distribute iOS apps outside the iOS App Store, or the fact many of the changes in Mac OS X Yosemite are either better integration with iOS, or Lion and Mountain Lion-style “iOS-ification”, both of which would be better solved by transitioning the Mac to iOS, etc.

But in the end, the attitude change from Apple matters more than the specifics of what will come in iOS 8. And it was (as Matt Drance wrote) not just the announcements themselves: for instance with the video shown at the start of the keynote where iPhone and iPad users praise apps and the developers who made them, Apple wants us to know that they care for us developers and want us to succeed, which is a welcome change from the lack of visible consideration developers were treated with so far (with the limitation that this video frames the situation as developers directly providing their wares to users: don’t expect any change to how Apple sees middleware suppliers).

So I welcome this attitude change from Apple, and like Matt Drance, I am glad this seems to be coming from a place of confidence rather than concession (indeed, while the Google Play Store is much more inclusive1, the limited willingness of Android users to pay for apps means Apple probably does not feel much pressure in this area), which means that it’s likely only the first step: what we did not get at this WWDC, we can always hope to get in iOS 9, and at least the situation evolves in the right direction. I do not know where this change of heart comes from, I do not think any obvious event triggered it, I am just thankful that the Powers That Be at Apple decided to be pragmatic and cling less tightly to principles that, while potentially justified five years ago, were these days holding back the platform.

A caveat, though, is that I see one case where a new iOS 8 functionality, rather than giving me hope for the future, will actually hamper future improvements: iCloud Drive. While that feature may appear to address one of my longstanding pet peeves, anyone who thinks we were clamoring for merely a return to the traditional files and folders organization hasn’t really read what I or others have written on the matter; but this is exactly what iCloud Drive proposes (even if only documents are present in there, and even for just the files shared between different iOS apps, we expected better than that). Besides not improving on the current desktop status quo, the issue is that shipping it as such will create compatibility constraints (both from a user interface and API standpoint) which will make it hard for Apple to improve on it in the future, whereas Apple could have taken advantage of its experience and of the hindsight coming from having been without that feature for all this time to propose a better fundamental organization paradigm.

For instance, off the top of my head I can think of two ways to improve the experience of working on the same document from different apps:

Instead of (or on top of) “open in…”, have “also open in…”, which would also work by selecting an app among the ones supporting that document type. After that command, the document would appear in a specific section of the document picker of the first app, section with would be marked with the icon of the second app: in other words, this section would contain all documents shared between the first and second app. The same would go in the second app: the shared document would appear in a section marked with the icon of the first app. That way some sort of intuitive organization would be automatically provided. A document shared between more than two apps could appear in two sections at the same time, or could be put in the area where documents are available to all apps.

Introduce see-through folders. A paradox of hierarchical filing is that, as you start creating folders to organize your documents so as to more easily find something in the future, you may make documents harder to locate because they become “hidden” behind a folder. With see-through folders any folder you create would start with being just a roundrect drawn around the documents it would contain (say up to 4 contained documents), with the documents still being visible in their full size from the top level view, except there would be this roundrect around them. Then as the folder starts containing more and more documents, these documents would appear smaller and smaller from the top level view, so in practice you would have to “focus” on the folder by tapping on the folder name, so as to list only the documents contained in that folder, in full size, in order to select one document. When you have more than one level of folders, this would allow quickly scanning subfolders that contain only a few documents, since these documents would appear at full size when browsing the parent of these subfolders, so the document could either quickly be found in there, or else we would know it is in the “big” subfolder.

There are of course many other ways this could be improved, such as document tagging, or other metadata-based innovations. There are so many ways hierarchical document storage could be improved that Apple announcing they would merely go with pretty much the status quo for multi-app document collaboration tells me that in all likelihood no one who matters at Apple really cares about document management, which I find sad: even if not all such concocted improvements are actually viable, there is bound to be some that are and that they could have used instead.

(As for Swift, it is a subject with a very different scope that is deserving of its own post.)

But overall, these new developments seen at WWDC 2014 make me optimistic for the future of the Apple platforms and Apple in general. Even if it is not necessarily everything we wanted, change always starts with first steps like these.

“Open” implies a binary situation, where a platform would be either “open” or “closed”; but situations are clearly more nuanced, with a whole continuum of “openness” between different cases such as game consoles, the iOS platform, the Android platform, or Windows. So I refer to platforms as being “more inclusive” or “less inclusive”, which allows for a range of, well, inclusiveness, rather than use “open” and the absolutes it implies.↩